No customers came in. She turned her sad and patient eyes upon the street, thinking--not of the cutler's over the way, with whose son Franky had formed such an undesirable friendship, nor of the passers by on the narrow pavement, nor of the tradesmen's carts rattling over the cobble stones; thinking of Bernard on his way to India and untold danger and privations, of Deleah and her dismissal from the school. Her pretty, good child, to have received such shabby treatment! Deleah, who if she had chosen might have queened it over them all. Of her steadily declining business, too, she thought, and of how impossible it was for her to cope with Coman's, down the street. To-morrow was the seventh, the day set apart in each month by Mr. Boult for going into her affairs; looking through her books, catechising her, cross-questioning her, giving her advice in his tyrannical, bullying way. From this her thoughts glanced off to the subject Bessie had held forth upon in her irritating, worrying fashion, through tea. "It is a pity the child did not have his face washed, certainly," she said. At last a customer! No, only the cutler's little boy, Franky's chum, from across the way. The cutler hired a strip of garden on one of the roads, and when tea was over, in the summer evenings, Franky and the cutler's son ran off together to their garden to get into what childish mischief was possible in the restricted space. "Franky isn't in, this evening," Mrs. Day told the boy. "He's gone for a drive with Mr. Forcus." She gave him a screw of acid-drops for himself, and the boy ran off. "All ri', thenk ye. Tell Franky I looked in," he called. The next comer was the fat little maid-of-all-work from the butcher's, near by. She was red-haired, with a large goitre over which her afternoon black frock would not quite button. She was hardly worked from early morning, to late evening, and Mrs. Day, ever full of compassion for the weak and oppressed, was kind and gentle to her. She was generally breathless with hurry and the trouble of the goitre, and Mrs. Day took no special notice of her panting condition now. "What for you to-night, Alice?" she asked her. "It's soap," Alice gasped. "Soap, and matches, and six eggs for the morning's breakfast, and I was to tell you, if you please, as you was to put in seven, steads of six, for one in the last lot was stale. And have you heard, please, there's been an accident with that there Mr. Forcus's tricky horse?" Mrs. Day's dark eyes gazed at the girl out of a face blanched to the pallor of the dead. "There have, then! Master, he jus' come in and said so. His horse is kilt; and the groom, he's cut about the face; and your little boy, what he took a ridin' with him, have got his neck broke." CHAPTER XXV To Make Reparation "Of course we must do something for them," Sir Francis said. "The difficulty is to decide what."